Miranda Lambert says she is “happily single,” and ready to focus on music – both her own and the latest project she just finished with Pistol Annies.
“Love is a hard road sometimes and it’s been a roller-coaster ride for me, but I’m definitely thankful for all the ups and downs because I’ve had some really good songs come out of it,” Lambert tells The Tennessean. “You’ve got to take the bad parts and put them on paper and then move on to the happy parts.”
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The bad parts for Lambert include a divorce to Blake Shelton in 2015, followed by a two-year relationship with singer-songwriter Anderson East. Most recently, she was tied to Evan Felker, frontman for the Turnpike Troubadours, who allegedly was still married when rumors began to swirl of a romance with Lambert.
Although the “Keeper of the Flame” singer might be newly unattached, she certainly has plenty on her mind – including the just-finished Pistol Annies record, the third from the trio, which also includes Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley.
“Since our last record, we’ve had two divorces, a marriage, two babies and one on the way,” Lambert says. “Now we’ve got two husbands, one single and happy, and I just feel like we live such crazy lives. That’s a lot of life to be lived in just five years between three women, and I feel like we’re just telling the story of what all of that is and doing it very honestly.”
Annies Up, Pistol Annies sophomore record, was released in 2013. Since then, Lambert released Platinum in 2014, followed by her double-disc reflective The Weight of These Wings in 2016. But now, Lambert is opening up through her music in a new way, sharing not only her story but Monroe’s and Presley’s as well.
“Sometimes the music is so honest that it’s like, ‘Oh, that kind of hurts a little,’” Lambert concedes. “But, it’s good. We just want women to understand that we’re all doing the same thing. We’re all just living our lives and having the same struggles and the same joys and the same outlooks.”
“We can say a little bit more than we would be willing to alone because it is all of our story,” she adds. “And, we can blame it on the other one, too.”
The three women, close friends on and off stage, have become their own safety net for each other, intertwining their personal lives in their music.
“It’s all of things that women do and those conversations sometimes involve tears and those tears become songs,” Lambert explains. “The joy when we laugh and giggle all night, those become songs I think that’s important because we want women to hear us and know they’re not alone in whatever they’re doing.”
A release date for the next Pistol Annies album has yet to be announced.
Photo Credit: Getty images/Ethan Miller
